By: Benjamin Conlon

Maya is an incredible kid - smart, hardworking, and kind. She loves to read and draw and goof around with her little brothers. Her absolute favorite thing to do is play the keyboard. She’s devoted a lot of time and effort to it, and not many kids her age can play as well. Maya’s exceptional - and she’s proud of that. She’s happy with herself and who she is. 

Summer has just drawn to a close, and it’s the first day of seventh grade. She’s not worried though. She has always loved school and is looking forward to seeing her best friend, Sophie. Maya spent the summer on a cross-country road trip with her family, and the two friends have been apart for almost two months. It’ll be great being back together.

She heads downstairs with little more than a glance in the mirror. Right after breakfast, Sophie’s mom pulls up to bring the girls to school. There’s a happy reunion and flurry of updates as the car pulls away. Maya is relaying a story about getting a flat tire in the desert when a black iPhone dings from the seat between them.

Sophie grabs it and smiles, then begins typing fiercely.

“What?” asks Maya. “What is it?”

Sophie points to the screen. Instagram is open.

Maya’s eyes widen. “You got it? When?”

“Couple weeks ago.”

“And she’ll be losing it in no time if she’s not careful,” her mother says from the front seat. “Your friend was in the middle of a story.”

“Oh… that’s okay. It wasn’t important.” Maya leans in and lowers her voice. “Don’t you have to be thirteen to get on Instagram?”

Sophie shrugs.

Ten minutes later, the girls step into school and head for class. Phones weren’t allowed in sixth grade, but seventh grade is different. Up and down the hallways, the students huddle together over glowing screens.

Maya wonders if they’re all on Instagram. Maybe she’s the only one who isn’t. A strange knot forms in her stomach.

By lunchtime, her suspicions are confirmed. Sophie barely touches her food, concentrating instead on her phone.

 “Aren’t you hungry?”

Sophie shakes her head. “Trying to fast during the day. A lot of influencers are doing it. Don’t tell my mom.” 

Influencers? Maya’s heard the term but isn’t sure what it means.

Sophie looks up from the phone and smiles proudly. “I just hit 300 followers.”

“Already? That was fast.”

“Not really.” She nods across the cafeteria. “Olivia has 500.”

The knot in Maya’s stomach tightens.

After school, she goes up to her room to practice the keyboard. It’s usually her favorite time of the day, but it’s hard to concentrate this afternoon. She gives up after a few minutes and lies down on the bed. Her phone buzzes - a text from Sophie. For a moment, her heart leaps. Maybe Sophie wants to do something. She unlocks the screen and discovers a video link followed by “Being silly” and an emoji crying with laughter. But Maya can’t see the video. Instead, a window opens up with the Instagram logo. Would you like to download the app?

Her finger hovers over the screen. She considers going back to the keyboard but clicks yes instead.

She pauses again when the app asks for her date of birth. You have to be thirteen to use Instagram. But…twelve is basically the same as thirteen, right? She enters a fake birthday, and, just like that, she’s in.

She sits there for a second, her heart thundering with anticipation.

Sophie’s video fills the screen. She’s lip-syncing to a song – but something about her face is different. Her eyes? Maybe her cheeks? It’s hard to say. Sophie looks up at the camera and blows a kiss as the video ends. It already has forty comments and twice as many likes. “You’re so cute!” “Beautiful!” “Luv this.” Maya is confused. The knot tightens again. And there’s a new feeling, too - this one unfamiliar.

She navigates to Sophie’s profile and discovers dozens of similar videos and photos. Most show Sophie laughing with other girls during the summer. Her face has that strange quality in each one. It’s different somehow. 

 The pictures make Maya sad. Lonely, too. She can remember being left out of a birthday party back in sixth grade. It was tough hearing the other girls mention it at school, but when she got home, it was over. This is different.  She can see what happened. She can see who was there. She can see how much fun they had without her. Sophie’s follower count is up to 454. The unfamiliar feeling grows stronger.

Maya looks at the wall above her dresser. It’s covered with awards and programs from her recitals -accomplishments that took a lot of hard work. She takes a deep breath. “I can do this too. First, I just need some followers.”

She looks back at her phone and scrolls through the names of people who have liked Sophie’s most recent photo. She follows everyone she recognizes - hoping they’ll follow her back. Hoping she’s good enough. Hoping she matters.

After making several dozen requests, she puts the phone down and returns to the keyboard. As soon as she sits down, the urge to go back and pick up the phone grips her. Only a few seconds have passed, but it’s impossible to resist. She gets up and hurries to the bed.

 She’s delighted to discover that she has three new followers. No, four! Four followers in just a few minutes. Sophie and three other sixth graders. That feeling - the new one – starts to go away.

She clicks the profile of a girl named Lucy. Her pictures and videos look a lot like Sophie’s. In fact, Sophie is in most of Lucy’s pictures. Maya hasn’t seen Lucy in a while but is struck by how mature she looks- almost high school age or even college. Her face is flawless. The strange new feeling comes back.

Maya has to fight the urge to check her account during dinner, and she has no interest in playing with her brothers afterward. She races back up to her phone and waits for more followers. When it’s time for bed, she’s disappointed to see she hasn’t even reached ten.

She returns to Sophie’s profile and looks through the pictures and videos. It’s amazing how much happened over the summer. All of it seems perfect. Not a single bad day. So many new friends and so much fun. 

Maya remembers that her summer was fun too. She saw the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls. She even performed in a concert at the Disney Opera house in Los Angeles. “I need to post something really good,” she thinks and retrieves a picture of herself sitting on stage at the piano—an incredible moment from an unforgettable evening – one of the best memories of her entire life.

She flips back to Instagram and taps upload. She smiles, thinking back to the concert and all the hard work that went into getting there. She sets the photo to public - confident that her follower count will grow when people start seeing it.

Two minutes later, no one has liked the picture. No new followers either. Five minutes after that, it’s the same. The unfamiliar feeling creeps up again as she shuts the app.

Maya is shocked to discover it’s 11:00 PM. She’s been on Instagram a long time and never had a chance to finish her keyboard practice. Oh, well. Tomorrow is another day. She plugs in the phone and rolls over, but it’s a long time before she falls asleep.

When the alarm sounds the next morning, she wakes up more tired than usual. Then she remembers her post. Before doing anything else- before looking out the window or sitting up in bed, she grabs her phone and opens the app.

Her heart sinks. Still no likes. She flips to Sophie’s photos. Four posts since last night. The most recent photo shows Sophie smiling into the mirror. It was added just twenty minutes ago and already has 45 likes.

Maya flips back to the picture from the recital.  Not a single like. Not a single person is willing to say, “I value this. This matters.” That new feeling- the one she’s known for just 24 hours- bubbles back up, and for the first time, she realizes what it is: shame. She deletes the post.

With nothing in her profile, Instagram automatically populates the home screen with suggestions- accounts followed by other girls like her. The recommendations are all young women, though precisely how young is hard to say. Most are on boats, or beaches, smiling and laughing. These pictures look a lot like the ones Sophie has been posting- flawless skin; perfect hair- but they have even more likes. Hundreds, thousands of likes. Is this what people want? Is this what she’s supposed to do?

She scrolls further down and stops at a sponsored post. It’s a picture of a girl that looks a lot like her. As Maya watches, the face on the screen starts to change. A pimple disappears. The eyes get bigger, and the cheekbones become more defined. The girl looks five, maybe ten years older. Maya watches the ad a second time. At the end of the transformation, a logo appears “Beauty Filters – Never Take A Bad Picture.” Is this what the other girls have been using? This must be what she needs.

Maya quickly downloads the filter app, opens it, and snaps a selfie. She watches in disbelief as her own eyes grow bigger, her skin is smoothed, and her cheekbones become more pronounced. She gets out of bed and stares into the mirror. Then back at the phone.

She likes what she sees on the screen more. She likes this digital version of herself better. She looks more like the influencers- the ones with all the followers, the ones who are valued.

She sits down at her desk, cocks her head to one side, smiles – and snaps another selfie. This time she filters the photo before uploading it, then she adds the caption, “Good Morning!”

Her mom knocks on the door. “Maya? You all right in there? You’re going to be late.”

“Coming!” She throws the phone on her bed and forces herself to start getting ready, but it’s too hard. It’s too hard not to check. She grabs the phone and grins. Her most recent photo has two likes. And there are two new followers! She gets excited.  The feeling of shame starts to go away. 

She posts another photo during lunch and another after school.

As the weeks pass, Maya spends more and more time on Instagram. She gets TikTok too. She likes TikTok because beauty filters are automatically applied. Filters that do everything from making lips plumper to faces thinner. One less thing to worry about. Before long, she’s so used to the enhanced version of her face that she starts to forget the real one. 

Sometimes she posts a photo that doesn’t get many likes. Sometimes she loses a follower, and the shame comes back. It’s a lot stronger than it was that first day. So she works harder, posts more, tries to keep it at bay. She follows new influencers who teach her how to dress and what she can eat to be better. She reaches 250 followers, then 300, but it’s not enough. She knows she can get to 1000- she just has to present herself in the right way. Others have done it.

Maya doesn’t spend quite as much time hanging out with her brothers now, and there’s not much time to read or draw.  She still plays the keyboard- but it doesn’t bring her the same satisfaction it used to. That’s okay. It doesn’t matter. She can focus on playing again later – maybe next week or next month. After all, she’s only twelve years old.

Benjamin Conlon is a public school teacher and author of The Slingshot’s Secret, a middle school mystery for anyone trying to find old-fashioned adventure in the digital age. The second book in the series, The Mansion’s Mystery, was released in November 2021.

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